Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  ROXELANA’S SUMMONS TO Suleyman’s chamber was a tribute to her success. The ultimate test, however, was whether he called her back and continued to do so until she became pregnant. As the Venetian Luigi Bassano, resident in Istanbul in the 1530s, explained the process to his readers, “The Grand Turk has a palace of women at quite a distance from his own. There he keeps a great number of young Christian slave girls.… From these the Grand Turk chooses whoever pleases him the most, and keeps her separate for two months, and amuses himself with her as he pleases. If she becomes pregnant, he takes her as his consort.”20

  Roxelana had been groomed and guided to the point of selection by Old Palace women and eunuchs, whose job it was to produce solid choices for the sultan. Any of a number of individuals could have brought her to the sultan’s attention: Hafsa, a sister, a patron who had presented her to the court. Or perhaps Roxelana devised her own strategy to make herself noteworthy. But it was the sovereign who had the last say in a slave’s future.

  Suleyman’s choice launched Roxelana on the career track that led to royal motherhood. No matter how she regarded her forced sexual submission to the monarch whose empire had enslaved her, she would understand that motherhood was the fastest route to a secure future in the competitive world of Ottoman royal politics. His summons exempted her from the career alternatives of continuing service in the Old Palace, perhaps culminating in the office of head stewardess, or, more likely, promotion from the palace as wife to a well-trained statesman with whom she would form another one of those satellite households.

  Where did Suleyman “keep Roxelana separate”? He could conceivably have lodged her in an apartment retained for the sultan in the Old Palace (Menavino reported that Suleyman’s grandfather Bayezid II stayed there periodically for three or four days). But he almost certainly kept her in the New Palace, where he might more conveniently “amuse himself as he pleased.” The New Palace contained quarters for females known as the Hall of the Maidens, a small and confining offshoot of the inner courtyard, perhaps deliberately out of alignment with the strictly linear layout of the all-male palace structure.21 Its rooms functioned primarily to house the sultan’s current favorites and the staff who served them.

  In one of the earliest accounts of Mehmed II’s new palace that mention this small harem, the Genoese merchant Iacopo di Promontorio described the residents of this “second seraglio of damsels,” as he put it, as “the most splendid, well-kept, and beautiful women that could be found in the world.”22 Estimates of female numbers varied: Promontorio thought there were 150 in 1475, while Venetian envoy Alvise Sagundino reported only 10 in the late 1490s.23 Promontorio was probably misinformed, or else he exaggerated for effect, but numbers may have fluctuated naturally, depending on the age and sexual activity of the sultan. Sagundino was envoy to the court of Bayezid II, who was in his early fifties at the time and appears to have fathered the last of his many children in the 1470s. In any event, most of these women were staff members, not concubines.

  Istanbulites were used to a constant flow of traffic between the New and Old Palaces. In addition to the sultan himself, officials, messengers, couriers, and servants went back and forth. So did princes as they got older—they lived in the Old Palace but acquired their education in part with their father’s apprentices in the New Palace. Some of those who traveled back and forth went on horseback, some by carriage, and some on foot, some singly and some with an accompanying retinue. Today it is more or less a half-hour walk from the Topkapı Palace to Istanbul University, which occupies the heart of the former Old Palace grounds. The lively if congested thoroughfare one follows has a long history. It served as the Byzantine Mese (middle way), the principal thoroughfare of Constantinople, while in Ottoman times (and still today) it was called Divan Yolu—Avenue of the Divan, the grand hall in the New Palace where the council of viziers met. This was the route Roxelana would follow on her journey to meet the sultan.

  Roxelana would make her way down the Avenue of the Divan in a curtained carriage, maintaining the seclusion from the public gaze that was the duty and prerogative of women of status. According to the Frenchman Postel, a newly chosen concubine was transported to the sultan’s residence in a richly caparisoned carriage, accompanied by four or five eunuchs.24 Whether or not Roxelana traveled in such splendor, she certainly went with attendants and probably a small armed guard. She would not need all her Old Palace trainers with her, for the Hall of the Maidens had its own staff adept at preparing girls for presentation to the sultan. Later, as Roxelana’s prestige grew, her trips between the two imperial residences would become more elaborate affairs.

  OVER TIME ROXELANA would become a connoisseur of Istanbul’s built landscape, of both its Byzantine monuments and the Ottoman rebuilding and remodeling that had burgeoned since the conquest. She would also become a great patron of the capital, leaving her own mark on the city’s face. It is tempting, then, to imagine her initial exposure to its imperial core. What would she have seen on her first trip “in state,” peeking guardedly from the windows of her vehicle?

  The small procession turned out of the Old Palace gates onto the Avenue of the Divan. Soon it would pass by the mosque of Bayezid II, Suleyman’s grandfather, an imposing structure situated on the square that in Byzantine times had been the forum of the emperor Theo-dosius I. The mosque anchored a whole foundation that included a madrasa (a college that taught Islamic law and other religious sciences), a primary school, a caravanserai cum hospice, a large public bath, and the tomb of its founder.25

  Bayezid’s complex was not as large as the mammoth one endowed by his father Mehmed II. Befitting the founder of Ottoman Istanbul, the Conqueror’s foundation included, in addition to the features present in his son’s, a hospital and a library. Its eight madrasas and eight preparatory madrasas would jump-start the production of a new class of Ottoman jurists, judges, teachers, and experts on matters of religion. One of the goals of these large imperial foundations, with the services they provided and employment they offered, was the stimulation of urban development. It was critical in the war-devastated city the Ottomans needed urgently to rebuild.

  If Roxelana were traveling near one of the five daily prayer times, she would see people making their way toward, or leaving, the precincts of Bayezid’s mosque. The streets were probably already congested with pedestrian traffic, as the city’s grand Covered Market was located adjacent to the mosque. Perhaps the colorful wares of peddlers working outside the bazaar walls caught her eye. Bayezid may have chosen the location of his mosque with the old bazaar in mind. It served the religious needs of Muslim shop owners, employees, and shoppers, while some of the foundation’s other services were presumably open to their Jewish and Christian counterparts as well.

  As the carriage moved along the Avenue of the Divan, Roxelana would encounter one of the oldest public baths in the Ottoman city. It had been donated in 1475 by Gedik Ahmed Pasha, a man of Serbian origin, one of Mehmed’s grand viziers. Top-ranking statesmen followed their monarch’s example in endowing urban amenities whose neighborhoods sometimes went on to acquire the donor’s name—to the point that one-fifth of Istanbul neighborhoods in 1990 bore the name of an Ottoman pasha.26 The next monument along Roxelana’s route was the small mosque of Atik Ali Pasha, a eunuch originally from a village near Sarajevo who served as grand vizier to Bayezid II. Commissioned in 1496, the pasha’s endowment, with its college, soup kitchen, and lodge for dervishes, straddled both sides of the Avenue.

  Visible ahead, dwarfing the minaret of Atik Ali’s mosque, was the ancient Column of Constantine. It was known to the Ottomans as the “hooped column” because of the iron bands that held together its six porphyry drums. The column stood in what had been the Forum of Constantine the Great, marking the foundation of Constantinople in the year 330 as the capital of the Roman empire. The splendor of the Byzantine square, with its imposing civic buildings and houses of worship, had long since vanished. But soon the elegant small mosque of another of Bayezid
’s eunuch officials, the chief treasurer Firuz Agha, slipped behind the carriage as the greatest of all Byzantine monuments loomed ahead in its majestic immensity.

  The Church of the Holy Wisdom—Hagia Sophia—was the work of the emperor Justinian the Great. Its doors opened to worshipers in 537. Procopius, Justinian’s contemporary and the principal historian of his long reign, wrote of it, “The church presents a most glorious spectacle, extraordinary to those who behold it and altogether incredible to those who are told of it. In height it rises to the very heavens and overtops the neighboring houses like a ship anchored among them, appearing above the city which it adorns.”27 The enormous basilica was allegedly the first destination of Mehmed II when he entered his new capital, only hours after the last emperor, Constantine XI, gave his life defending what had been for more than a millennium the capital of the now defunct Byzantine empire.

  It was said that Mehmed immediately called for an imam to recite the call to prayer inside Hagia Sophia, an act that reconsecrated the church as a mosque. The victor’s sentiments were not all triumphal, however. Tursun Beg, secretary to Mehmed’s council, biographer of “the Conqueror,” and participant in the conquest, recorded the twenty-one-year-old sultan’s reaction. Observing that the outer buildings of the church had fallen into decay in the empire’s twilight years, he “thought of the impermanence and instability of this world, and of its ultimate destruction.”

  One can only imagine Roxelana’s own musings as her carriage made its way past the edifice that had been forcibly converted from Christianity to Islam, as she herself had been. She probably had only a vague grasp of the glories of Byzantium, but as a young child she had doubtless heard tell of the tragic fall of the Constantinople Patriarchate into the hands of the infidel Turks. It stood to the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church, the heart of her family’s faith, as the Vatican stood to the Roman Catholic Church. But rather than destroy the greatest symbol of Byzantium’s Christian faith, Mehmed and his successors kept Hagia Sophia as the premier mosque of the Ottomans, the greatest symbol of the empire’s Muslim faith. (Turkish still calls it Aya Sofya.) As Angiolello put it, “The Turks have chosen [it] for their cathedral, and they worship there according to their laws.”28 There was nothing especially Ottoman in this reverence for sacralized space: the first great mosque built by a Muslim monarch, the Umayyad mosque of Damascus, lay atop a succession of former houses of worship—an ancient Aramaic temple dedicated to the god Hadad, a Roman temple to Jupiter, and lastly a cathedral to St. John.

  The first courtyard of the New Palace (later Topkapı Palace). Janissaries guard the outer entrance; Hagia Eirene is to the left immediately inside the gate, and the Middle Gate is at the top right. Seyyid Lokman, Hünernâme.

  This much history Roxelana did not know, at least not at that early moment in her career. But during the considerable time it took to circumnavigate Hagia Sophia, perhaps she reflected on the sights she had just seen. She probably recognized that three of the four Ottoman endowments she had passed were sponsored by converts like herself (for one thing, their scale was obviously smaller than that of Bayezid’s mosque). Living in the Old Palace, she learned that the most successful graduates of imperial training were expected to endow a mosque and, funds permitting, additional public service institutions. Hafsa’s own big project under construction in Manisa demonstrated that gender was no bar to this expectation. Did Roxelana already have a glimmer of what she herself might undertake if her encounter with Suleyman turned out successfully?

  The great basilica-mosque may have consumed the whole of Roxelana’s attention, but if she shifted her gaze to the right, she would see the old Byzantine Hippodrome. The surviving fragments of its coliseum-like grandstands were perhaps too distant to see from the carriage. But she could glimpse three monuments that still stood at its center, two of them ancient: an Egyptian obelisk, a bronze serpent column from Delphi, and a Byzantine obelisk. This vast open space, whose name the Ottomans retained—the square of the horses—would soon begin to function as the main arena for public spectacles and celebrations sponsored by the dynasty. Later in her life, Roxelana would watch the festivities from the enclosed balcony of a new mansion that would soon go up on the Hippodrome square, Suleyman’s gift to his grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha.

  Finally, as Roxelana and her escort moved beyond Hagia Sophia, they would arrive at the great outer walls of the New Palace. As the carriage passed through the gatehouse arch, guarded by members of the Janissary infantry corps, there appeared Hagia Eirene, former Church of Holy Peace. Now incorporated into the first public courtyard of the New Palace precincts, it served the Janissaries as an arsenal. The imposing “Middle Gate,” entrance to the palace proper, stood only a few minutes away.

  4

  THE POLITICS OF MOTHERHOOD

  ROXELANA WAS WELL prepared for her presentation to Suleyman. A royal concubine had more than the usual coaching of a virgin on the eve of her first sexual experience, for not offending her master was crucial for her survival. Rehearsing her introduction to the sultan was perhaps the final piece of a first-time concubine’s training. Roxelana would learn the protocols for approaching him and the formulas for addressing him when it was time to do so. Memorizing the right words may have been a reassuring exercise, especially if her Turkish was still hesitant.

  It would fall to Roxelana alone, however, to master any conflicting emotions she felt about the coming encounter. She recognized that to be chosen was an honor, the ultimate measure of her success. She also understood that by stimulating the sultan’s desire and holding onto it long enough to become pregnant she could ensure her future security among the Ottomans. But that did not necessarily mean that the young woman welcomed the prospect of sexual thralldom to the ruler of the empire that had made her a slave.

  In the Hall of the Maidens, Roxelana would be washed and dressed. If she had a patron in the Old Palace, a modestly alluring gown may have been provided for her. A small retinue of eunuchs would lead her to Suleyman’s private quarters. As she approached the Privy Chamber, eyes downcast, Roxelana would encounter the privileged male slaves who guarded its threshold. Her retinue would protect her from distraction, keeping her focused on the man she was about to be alone with.

  WHEN SULEYMAN GAVE the order to summon Roxelana to his bed chamber, he was no stranger to initiating a virgin slave into her role as concubine. He had had his own harem from the time he was seventeen or so, when he was serving in Caffa. It was not large, though, as befitted Suleyman’s status as an apprentice governor. An expense register from 1511, a year before his first son Mahmud was born, lists ten female slaves, while a later, undated one from the prince’s time in Manisa, a more significant post, listed seventeen.1 Not all of these women were his bedmates.

  What did Suleyman expect from his encounter with Roxelana? He was not duty bound to make the new girl a mother, though he probably hoped for a satisfying night with her. If he found her wanting, he could dismiss her after a polite reception. Even so, Suleyman came to this meeting prepared. He was head of the dynastic family, after all, and the new concubine could conceivably become an important part of it. He would know something of her—her Ottoman name, Hurrem, and where she came from. He may well have spoken a bit of her language, especially if his mother Hafsa had come from the same region.

  Sex for males of the Ottoman sultanate, as for any scion of a hereditary dynasty, was not always pleasure driven, for it was laden with political consequence. European fantasies about the libertine sensuality of Ottoman sultans were misplaced, at least with regard to Suleyman. The pressure to perform—to produce heirs to the throne—was inescapable. As his father Selim’s only surviving son, Suleyman’s task, as soon as he matured, was to provide children to perpetuate the dynastic line. But by the time he called for Roxelana, he had done his duty. He could afford to indulge himself—he had only one daughter, but he was the father of three sons. If Suleyman was pleased with his new choice, he would call her back. If she became pregnan
t, so much the better. Another son was dynastic insurance, and another daughter a delight.

  Whatever transpired that first night in the royal bedroom, Roxelana must have acquitted herself well. She conceived sometime within five months of Suleyman’s accession to the throne. (The timing of her pregnancy depends on the child’s birth date, for which only the year is recorded: 927 in the Islamic calendar, which ended on November 30, 1521.) Suleyman and Roxelana’s son Mehmed likely arrived sometime during his father’s absence at war—the sultan and his army left Istanbul in May of that year and returned in late October. With Suleyman gone, it is uncertain who gave the baby boy his name. Perhaps it was his grandmother Hafsa, the family’s head in her son’s absence. Or perhaps Suleyman indicated his preferences before departing—at that point it would have been obvious that his new concubine was with child. Whether Roxelana had any say in Mehmed’s naming we do not know.

  Even with Suleyman away from Istanbul, cannons would sound to announce the royal birth. While not his first son, Mehmed was the first child of Suleyman’s sultanate. He was also the first son of a sultan to be born in the capital in some forty-five years. It must have been a thrilling moment for the people of Istanbul, proud that their young ruler was both militarily and sexually dynamic. As if celebrating the first anniversary of his ascension, Suleyman presented them with a new prince and a stunning victory. The first military campaign of his reign culminated in spectacular success with the capture of Belgrade, capital city of Serbia.